1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a data transmission process for transmission of data sets between at least one server and one client, there being a display data set which is kept on the server and which is accessible to the client via a connection which has been set up at least temporarily on the server, the display data set being automatically retrieved from the server via at a connection which has been set up at least temporarily, transmitted to the client and displayed from the client.
2. Description of Related Art
Here, the term “server” is defined as a facility which is able to hold a plurality of data sets and to make them available to other facilities, specifically the “clients”. Here, data transmission between the server and the client is not limited to unidirectional data transmission from the server to the clients, but can also be bidirectional, so that data can also be transmitted from the clients to the server; this ultimately can be necessary for control.
These servers and clients can be, for example, Internet servers and computers connected to the Internet, such as PCs (personal computers) and also PDAs (personal digital assistant) as well as mobile phones with an Internet interface. However, the data transmission process described here is not limited to the area of servers and clients on the Internet. Rather, the data transmission process described here relates to all areas in which there can be servers which keep a plurality of data sets in order to be able to make them available to the clients via a network of fundamentally any kind. Other examples are broadcast transmission (radio and television) and transmission in mobile radiotelephone networks and transmission in LANs (local area networks), optionally configured as an intranet.
Simply for the sake of easier understanding and as a concrete example, reference is often made below to those servers and clients which are a component of the Internet and which are connected to one another via the Internet. For servers which are provided in the Internet and which can make available the data sets kept by them basically to any client with an Internet interface, data are transmitted on the basis of international standards such as the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The data sets kept on the server correspond to a certain code and are, for example, HTML files (Hypertext Markup Language). In the transmission of a HTML data set from a server to a client, at the client, the interpretation of the HTML commands takes place so that there is a corresponding display typically on the monitor of the client. In addition, various script languages are known with which an optionally animated display at the client can be achieved.
To display data sets kept on an Internet server, a suitable display program, a so-called browser, is necessary. This browser is able to interpret the data sets which have been transmitted from the server to the client and to convert them into a corresponding display. In addition, the browser also allows transmission of data from the client to the server. This is necessary, on the one hand, in navigation in the Internet, therefore ultimately to be able to access certain data sets of a server at all, and on the other hand, in this way, for example, those data sets which are necessary for transaction handling over the Internet can be transmitted to the server. If the user of a client with his client is visiting, for example, an online shop which is operated on an Internet server, it is ultimately not only necessary to transmit the corresponding sales pages from the server and receive them displayed, but also to transmit information with respect to desired products and other information, such as address and shipping information and payment information from the client to the server.
In the Internet browsers known from the prior art, this data transmission can take place from a client to a server via the retrieved Internet page. This is the case, for example, in the input of address data in order to obtain shipping of an order to this address. In addition, conventional Internet browsers allow the input of Internet addresses, either as IP numbers or via the pertinent domain names, in a window of the Internet browser in order to open the corresponding page which is desired by the user. It is essential in the existing Internet browser that only that type of data input and data transmission to a server is possible which is offered and allowed by the Internet page which has been retrieved at the time. This means that the user may not be able to transmit certain data desired by him or a third party when such an Internet page is retrieved with a source code to which he has no access and which he therefore cannot change according to his wishes for possible data transmissions to a server.